Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @12:30PM
from the but-can-i-bunny-hop dept.

Softhaus writes "The guys at Blood Frontier have been busy for the last two years working on a new FPS called (surprise) Blood Frontier. This game is an enhanced Cube 2 engine with original artwork and new gameplay (including a kid-mode, which optionally turns off the blood — a nice option for a change). Add the new paintball mode and you have a real 'game community' here. The code is all there (complete for you to play with), the team listens to feedback from the community, and the game is great! It's nice to see these talented guys showing a true free software attitude. They've mentioned that the first actual release is scheduled for next Friday. Does anyone know of other great open source games that are truly 'open?'"

I see the list has a screenshot for Battle for Wesnoth. I started playing it a couple months ago when it was mentioned here on Slashdot, and it's really fun.
It's a turn based strategy which is maybe not as intense as a RTS or FPS. But it's perfect for me because I have young kids and frequently get interrupted, so I need a game that I walk away from without messing up the game.

TOME [t-o-m-e.net] is a very good game as well, if you can handle totally keyboard interfaces. It is similar to nethack, but has more of the things you'd expect from a typical modern RPG. It has a (very dated) graphics mode or text. Only problem is probably the difficulty, you'll die a lot first starting out. Enable the cheat death option until you get the hang of it; it'll make the game much more fun.

I like Wesnoth, but whenever I start to get into it and feel "hey, this is a really well put together, prefessional-quality game" something monumentally stupid happens, and all the warm fuzzy feeling that I had towards it fades away into thinking "another open-source project that hasn't quite made it".

OpenArena is a violent, sexy, multiplayer first person shooter based on the ioquake3 fork of the id tech 3 engine. It has many game types beyond deathmatch and a lot of characters. Due to violent and racy content, it may not be suitable for children under 17.

The game is absolutely free and all development is done by the community, including maps, media, and running the game servers. IMHO, it's the only game worth playing that gives me exactly what I need - less BS effects, more fast-paced action and great flexibility at customization (settings, mods, etc). Also, it has a somewhat small but very unique community of players, ser

Lots of clones (ie total ripoffs from original ideas), some commercial games open-sourced by their owners and about three original games in there.

Yay for F/OSS.

Any truly original games released recently? On the commercial side we've seen some real innovation lately, but that list (which I hope is woefully out of date) shows OSS is less of a gaming platform than OS X.

As someone else said - why should we care that yet another FPS has arrived? What does it bring that's new, unique and interesting?

Or that FOSS lacks the funds to have a server which can handle the load.

It's great they are doing this - but in the end the project needs funding to get huge - otherwise it is a hobby for the technical folk (with rare exception).

With luck these guys will use this on their resume', get great jobs, and help make some great products. I know someone will flame me, and 5 others will mod me down - but think about it. WoW costs money (all three expansions = about 75-100 probably), then it's 14.95 a month. Not free at all - but look at the game. It's been out since what 2002 and still the most played game with the largest base of paid accounts. None of that could not happen if the resources were not in place, and resources are limited which means they cost money.

An FPS is a much different project than an MMORPG like Wow. An FPS-style game can actually be considered finished at a given point while an MMORPG requires constant development (as long as you want to keep customers, that is). There's a long history of people making full-featured games for free and actually completing them. It's just that the list of incomplete ones dwarf the complete ones.

There's Nexuiz, OpenArena, Sauerbraten, Tremulous, Urban Terror... I had my fill of first person shooters years ago and yet for some reason they're still being developed and offer little to nothing different over the last one.

So what makes this online FPS stand out from all the other ones?
There's Nexuiz, OpenArena, Sauerbraten, Tremulous, Urban Terror... I had my fill of first person shooters years ago and yet for some reason they're still being developed and offer little to nothing different over the last one.

I don't know why this guy got modded Troll. Wanting to know what's different about a title is a perfectly valid question. Especially in a -recently- unadventurous genre, such as the FPS. As is being bored of a genre a perfectly valid statement, when taken in that context. Sure, if he's just shown up to announce that he didn't care about FPS games, that wouldn't have added much. But 'What's different?' is really the question 'Why should I care?' and that's a perfectly fair question to ask.

The main site's been slashdotted, all we've got is the summary, and the only real selling point mentioned there is that it's open source. If that's enough for you, sure, fine, ok. But for me open source is a BONUS, not a panacea.

Interesting side note: I know one of the main designers of Tremulous through an old friend. Nice guy, drives an utterly crazy car.

And the way his post was written, it was pretty easy to see it as condescending.

I really don't think it was. There's this perception that is slowly creeping into the mass consciousness like any sort of worm. The perception is that anyone who says what he genuinely thinks and is unashamed of it must be arrogant or condescending because everyone else is falling over themselves to follow up their opinions with "as long as that doesn't offend you". This is a perversion and it's designed to make you timid an

There's Nexuiz, OpenArena, Sauerbraten, Tremulous, Urban Terror... I had my fill of first person shooters years ago and yet for some reason they're still being developed and offer little to nothing different over the last one.

I think you weren't trolling and were merely stating your opinion. The mods and one poster (who was also rewarded by the mods -- do you see the self-reinforcing nature of derision?) have effectively ridiculed you because it was very easy to do. You may not have known it but you stuck your neck out and they gleefully took a swing at it. They don't know they are making a statement about themselves and the appeal that low-hanging fruit has over them, as you may not know that this was predictable given how l

I never understood the purpose of this. If it is for children then what is the rational behind it? If it is just to help children differentiate from real-life traumas then I advocate the extra-blood option. It is not likely someone will get fragged and it rain blood for two minutes irl. Either way the whole idea is silly. Like showing kids a movie with someone being tortured and censoring the cuts. It doesn't affect anything.

I appreciate those options for myself. I remember with TA: Kingdoms turning off the blood because my archers would shoot a guy so many times that blood would be spurting out nonstop, which I found gross at the time. Same with the gore in the original UT. I can see parents appreciating that in addition to people who just don't like gore.

Also, if you do paintball mode it turns it from a game where you're killing people to a game where it's just some guys playing paintball. Does it change the gameplay? Of course not, but it does change the entire frame of reference for the violence in the game. I can see that being desirable for parents and I think it's a great idea. My friend and I were talking about how they should do something along the lines of Unreal Tournament: Nerf Edition, where all the guns are nerf guns.

I was going to flame you but then I re-read your post and I somewhat agree with you.

But I don't think it's fair to lump parents into two categories - those close-minded fundamentalists who shelter their children, and open-minded free thinkers who teach their children to make their own decisions. That's stereotypical nonsense.

Violence is part of life. Animals eat other animals, and even my three-year-old daughter is starting to understand that. But gratuitous violence which we watch for our enjoyment and a

But I don't think it's fair to lump parents into two categories - those close-minded fundamentalists who shelter their children, and open-minded free thinkers who teach their children to make their own decisions. That's stereotypical nonsense.

I say it knowing it's stereotypical because it provides contrast. Some contrast is needed in order to get people to consider new ideas or to reconsider old ideas from a different perspective. You were not my target audience because you are clearly able to see these

I'm going to guess you were modded flamebait because you're doing the very thing that you're saying people shouldn't do. Take, for example, these two quotes.

It's desirable for parents who feel good about sheltering their children from the world instead of equipping their children to deal with the world (and maybe, just maybe, to build a better world). By extension it's desirable for parents who don't know the difference, too.

You leave absolutely no room for people in the middle, people who believe that children should be able to participate in violent images but not at all ages. Football, soccer, and tag are all (at least arguably) stand ins for more violent behavior, but parents and society monitor the level of violence that they're able to participate in so that they can

I don't know what the purpose is, but I have to say I like the option personally.
Does blood spatter enhance the game for you? Then go for it, but for my taste many gore effects just help to juvenilize most games; it's like endless penis jokes in an Adam Sandler movie, if I had the option to turn off "13 year old mode" I'd actually be able to enjoy the experience.

I don't know what the purpose is, but I have to say I like the option personally.
Does blood spatter enhance the game for you? Then go for it, but for my taste many gore effects just help to juvenilize most games; it's like endless penis jokes in an Adam Sandler movie, if I had the option to turn off "13 year old mode" I'd actually be able to enjoy the experience.

We just have different definitions of juvenile.

I think that it's quite natural for there to be blood when a character is shot with a bullet. To me, what's juvenile is to portray something completely unnatural, like a bloodless bullet wound, for the sole purpose of placating the easily offended. No one really respects that kind of people-pleasing, not even those who vehemently demand it, and for good reason. It's a subservient desire to appease that makes a mockery of real respect and of anything that

This reminds me of an Onion video [theonion.com] that showed a sequel to WoW called World of World of Warcraft that let your characters buy and play WoW themselves. I got a kick out of it, but then again, I'm not a WoW player...

No. You see, you have these things called "paintguns." You aim them at the opponent, pull a trigger, and if you're aim is good (and the gun isn't crap, the paint isn't crap, the wind doesn't pick up, and there's not a stray branch you didn't see between the two of you), you hit them. That's commonly referred to as "shooting."

OK - sure. You can call it "painting" as well if you really want to. But that's ignoring the actual mechanics of the equipment used (which shouldn't be confused with most painting

Yeah - that's speedball. Which is a fun game in itself. But that's a variation really designed for TV and fast elimination competition.

And honestly - I know where you're coming from. I've been around paintball for years. I've watched it go from "survival game" to "legitimate sport." You can call them markers all you want. It's valid. But they are, in fact, guns. They're a far cry from firearms and only a small subset of folks still try to equate them with firearms. But whether they be dressed up to

Semantics, but their original purpose was to paint trees with a mark. The game came later

Trees and livestock - the Nelspot 007. Fancy pumps were a later innovation. The first paintgun designed for sport was the Splatmaster (produced by NSG). I don't have a Nelspot. But I do have a Splatmaster, a Rapide, a GZ1000 (the return of Gurnsey) and in a similar class - a PGP.

In a wierd twist of history, I had one player's father buy a PGP to mark his cattle.

Another oddity - when we got permission to play in the woodlands in some areas in Germany, one stipulation tended to be that we didn't use specific colors which they used to mark trees for forestry management. I'd imagine it would be tragic to find whole areas cleared by mistake.

When we played in the German winters, we'd keep our paint in coolers (no ice) to maintain temperature. We would also trade out paint we had left in our hoppers for paint from the cooler every one or two games. It still only did so much.

One game got cold enough to decrease the pressure of the CO2 we were using (yeah - back in the old days when CO2 in 7oz bottles was still pretty advanced, siphon tubes belonged on gimmic guns using.62 cal, and dinosaurs roamed the earth). Our effective range began to drop. Paintballs that managed to lob far enough to hit someone just kind of bounced around a bit. Both teams decided to end the game and charge. I found myself pitted up against my wife who laughed at my attempts to shoot her. That is, until one hit squarely in her chest.

I saw the bruise. Once. It was a particularly cold few weeks that winter.

Why take a game [...] and modify it so you are pretending to pretend to [...]

Let's say you can play the guitar and pretend you're a rock star.

Then you play GH and pretend you play the guitar, so you pretend that you pretend you're a rock star.

Why? Because people like it. Or, if you prefer: because it sells well, and it sells well because people like it.

World of Padman is a quite fun FPS where you shoot paint, among other things. Granted, it's in a cartoony setting in the first place, so the paint fits in, but I'm not convinced it wouldn't be fun to shoot pretend paint at pretend

Another FOSS FPS? Check out AssaultCube [cubers.net], description from the website:

AssaultCube,
formerly ActionCube, is a free first-person-shooter based on the game Cube. Set in a realistic looking environment, as far as that's possible with this engine, while gameplay stays fast and arcade. This game is all about team oriented multiplayer fun.

including a kid-mode, which optionally turns off the blood â" a nice option for a change

Why is it that people think turning off blood makes things "kid friendly"? Are you still running around killing people?

I'm not the sort of person who's a big believe in sheltering children, but if you are that sort of person, does simply censoring blood make the game OK to play? I think if I were the sort of parent that didn't want my kids to play violent games, then censoring a little gore wouldn't really make them acceptable.

On the other hand, some parents are a little crazy, so whatever. I just think it's weird to censor blood out of a FPS called "Blood Frontier", and then call it "kid mode".

It's a videogame. No people are being killed. The 'pretend people' that you're 'shooting at' (pressing a butting to make a graphic appear), are not actually real people, and they are not actually being injuired, maimed, or killed.

I really am not trying to be snarky, but I don't think you read my post very well and perhaps missed the point. I was saying I'm not the sort who thinks that kids need to be highly sheltered from video game violence. I don't think pretending to kill people is all that big of a deal.

On the other hand, I have some understanding of why parents get concerned about these things, and I think it's fine for parents to believe that their children shouldn't be exposed to that sort of thing. In those cases, I thin

Oh yes, absolutely. Just think of the chiiiildren. Remove from sight what offends you and everything will be fine. You can't change human nature, but you can push it underground, into repression, where you can then capitalise on it. That's been modus operandi of the catholic church and every other conservative power group for at least a thousand years, probably a lot more.

See, removing child porn from the Internet is so much more important than actually finding and locking up the people who produce it. And

Why is it that people think turning off blood makes things "kid friendly"? Are you still running around killing people?

I'm not the sort of person who's a big believe in sheltering children, but if you are that sort of person, does simply censoring blood make the game OK to play? I think if I were the sort of parent that didn't want my kids to play violent games, then censoring a little gore wouldn't really make them acceptable.

Let me ask you this: In the Disney movie "Snow White", would it be as accepted as a kid's movie if it showed the hunter tearing the pumping heart out of a pig, or showed the jagged rocks tearing apart the flailing, twitching body of the evil witch? Such things happen during the course of the movie, but are not shown. The violence is implicit, not explicit, and therefore it runs above the line of childhood trauma.

I could go on for hours on this subject, but the best way for you to understand is to raise a 5-10 year old child. You'll recognize the difference, quickly, between what causes nightmares and what does not. Philosophize all you want, but you're talking theory to a world of practice. Kids freak out much more over the sight of a shootout where the walls are being splashed with blood, and one where people just fall over.

You'll recognize the difference, quickly, between what causes nightmares and what does not....Kids freak out much more over the sight of a shootout where the walls are being splashed with blood, and one where people just fall over.

So your aim is to make sure you expose your kids to violence, but just to make sure that they don't get nightmares about it?

I dunno, but I might wonder whether "my kids are too young to be exposed to depictions of bloody gun violence," should be considered a much different statement than, "my kids are too young to be exposed to depictions of gun violence." If your kids are constantly being exposed to violence, maybe it's best that they are a bit horrified by it.

While I agree that it's important that the concepts of death and harm not be sanitized too much, you have to temper it to the maturity of the viewer. At some point, we all had to learn that people die, and that death is permanent. There's a reason Bambi makes kids cry. Once your child understands that that is what is happening, story-wise, they will understand what's going on better. Whether it's an old Errol Flynn movie where the bad guy gets skewered, or a western where people tend to just keep over,

Sure. I'd agree that there is such a thing as age-appropriate violence (or whatever terminology you'd like to use). That is to say, children's entertainment probably shouldn't be sanitized of all violence and conflicts, and that including some kinds of violence without the full gory detail is probably a good idea.

The issue in my mind is not some kind of absolute, but more of an issue of degree. I haven't been able to get much detail on this particular FPS, but it seems unlikely to me that something call

... is the server still that horribly unsafe bare-bones packet-switch, that it is in Cube 2?

For those that don't know the details: The "server" of Cube 2 (Sauerbraten) is really basically just sending update packages around. No rules/physics validation, server simulation, or cheat checking of any kind. This, and the fact that it is open source, made it possible for every noob with a bit of C/C++-knowledge, to change some rules, and cheat like crazy.I played it for some months, and saw people flying around, beaming themselves to where they liked it, completely defeating game physics, and making every shot a perfekt hit.

If this is not fixed, there is no reason to play that game, because you can't determine a winner anyway. (Or is it going to become a contest of the greatest hackers?;)

Um, no. If your server code balks at someone exceeding 75mph on foot, it will do it whether or not it's open source. The client has no control over the server's physics checks. The problem is that those checks don't exist.

It's easy to do those kind of hacks in closed-source projects too, that's why almost every commercial game has moved to not trusting the client as much as possible, only sending it what the client can see and only accepting input it trusts as valid.

You are on Slashdot claiming that? Turn in your UID. You essentially just said that we can't use Linux any more since everyone can hack us because it is open source.

There is a difference between open source and secure. You don't seem to understand that they aren't the opposite. There can be both secure and insecure open source. It sounds like this is just done poorly. People don't want to play a game where everyone is cheating.

You essentially just said that we can't use Linux any more since everyone can hack us because it is open source.

No. He's saying that it's (much!) easier to pull off certain kinds of cheats when you've got the source than when you don't.

Part of the problem is that clients get information (and often do in fact need it) that they're not supposed to show to the user. A simple example: player inspects all packets that flow between his client and the server in order to dump all player positions from the data. Wit

Sounds like the public game server should be doing some hash-checking on client installations.

Okay. I reverse engineer the client to determine what kind of crazy dance I must perform to make the serve think I'm kosher. Then I cheat.

The server has been assured of what, exactly?

To make it painstakingly clear, the security is this:

There's a server and a bunch of clients. There are trust boundaries between everybody, meaning no one trusts another. Having the client tell the server "You can trust me" doesn't make the client trustworthy. Sending a hash value is a different way to "spell" the message

I've played a lot of FPS' up to Unreal2004, and some are clearly better than others. There's the obvious map features, like size vs. player number, overall layout, wall design with hiding places, etc. And that's not even counting the artistic side of texture mapping and making it look interesting.

But the player dynamics, and weapon characteristics combine to subtly change the intensity/speed of the game. For example the archaic Marathon was very slow due to show shot speed comparatively weak weapons. Quake III has much stronger weapons making distances seem shorter due to the killing power.

Unreal has a great balance, of player speed, map size and weapon strength/diversity that makes it consistently fun to play. It also has reasonably good AI for the bots. This balance seems to be elusive in FPS, as there are so few who really get it right, and you can see that in the communities they spawn.

I hope these OSS projects can match the balance of a great FPS even if they don't have the deep pockets or manpower to spend on visually stunning maps.

In Unreal 2004? The bots that follow the same retarded routes over and over, frequently stop and stare into space during critical moments, and will shoot at you even though you're further away than the engine can even render, are hidden in foliage, and aren't doing anything tactically significant anyway, while ignoring the guy taking down their node six feet away?

Unreal 2004 has some of the most retarded bots I've ever seen in a game, to the point where if

Does anyone know of other great open source games that are truly 'open?'"

is this question, appended to the end of the whole paragraph solely pimping a game, really necessary ? it seems as eloquent and delicate as a butterfly that's landed on a horse's dick. if you gonna pimp the game, just pimp it.

While train simming is not exactly a hot genre it has been entering the mainstream as of late. The proprietary contenders currently include Kuju's Rail Simulator and Auran's Trainz series. Both are closed-source but use plain XML for all their data files which makes developing easy for these sims. Microsoft decided to re-enter the race with a new "Microsoft Train Simulator 2" bragging that they have endless resources and will beat any competitor. A few days ago, however, they canned the project along with e

The first thing I thought about after reading the name of the game was the horrible horror/action movie made by the characters in Metalocalypse, "Bood Ocean". Now I can't get the idea of Nathan Explosion doing the absurd voiceover in the mock movie preview but doing it for "Bood Frontier".

Welcome to Blood Frontier, and thanks for your interest! Please note that Blood Frontier is in early alpha stages, and as such, is not yet fully finished, polished, or even playable. It is intended as a multiplayer only demo of what is to come in future versions, meaning that singleplayer and enemies are

For those who have ever spent an entire Typing Class period in middle school on a Mac playing Bolo will find WinBolo [winbolo.net] very familiar.

While WinBolo has been around for a decade or so, the source was released about a month ago [winbolo.net]. And by source, that means a few things: the logviewer, the server (Windows and Linux), the client (Windows), a Java port, as well as the backend for the winbolo.net domain.

You joke, but I think an updated Oregon Trail would be interesting. Scout your path in first person, do minigames for river crossings, hunt things in first person, perhaps. Include an option to play it "desert bus" style, for the truly masochistic.;)

I played Trem for a while, but it has some problems, some of which are not that hard to fix. To name one, all players on the human team have the same model/skin/voice.The graphics are kinda old which wouldn't bother me that much if it weren't for the samewhat disappointing gameplay. Humans tend to camp a lot until they get enough kills for stage 3, and one or two feeders on your team can make you lose the game easily. Also, deconners suck.